


Nebraska

by NiCad



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Abandonment, Absent Parents, Exile, Existential Angst, Gen, Hiding, Loss of Parent(s), Robot/Human Relationships, Safe Haven
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-23 14:30:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14936079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NiCad/pseuds/NiCad
Summary: Springer and Verity's life between Sins of the Wreckers and Requiem of the Wreckers.





	1. Weathering the Storm

**Author's Note:**

> I'm feeling a collection of short stories coming on and don't have the patience to make them something into a coherent whole. Chapters won't necessarily be posted in the order that they occur - merely the order that they dump out of my head and onto the page. I'm not sure where this will take me, and I'm not even sure if they're actually in Nebraska. It looked sort of like Nebraska. Let's call it Nebraska.
> 
> *Minor* spoilers for Requiem, at least for now. I'll note here when that changes.

_I've tried to figure out_  
_I can't understand_  
_What it means_  
_To be whole again…_  
_So let it rain down and wash everything away_  
_I hope that tomorrow the sun will shine_

Creed, [Rain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k3jxi4JhXA)

* * *

 

Verity snapped awake as thunder crashed and the barn groaned around her, straining against the gusts of a late-spring Nebraska storm. Wind howled around the eaves of the roof and hail pelted the window of her bedroom, but the barn held steady. She crawled out of bed and tried to look out the window, but could see little more than blinding rain illuminated by the next flicker of lightning.

She heard Springer downstairs on the lower level add wood to the pot-bellied stove. Looking at the 2 AM time on the clock, she realized that, despite the storm raging outside, her room was warmer than it usually was this time of night.

Looks like someone else wasn’t able to sleep, either.

She stepped into her slippers, wrapped a blanket around herself, and headed downstairs.

Springer was sitting on the floor, shoulders propped against one of the support beams, one leg stretched out, the other knee pulled up, facing the warmth of the stove. He cast a glance in her direction as she reached the landing. “Storm wake you up?”

“Yeah.” She climbed up his hip and curled up on the even surface of his thigh. “Any word on how much longer?”

He materialized a communi-cube in his palm with a weather radar app already loaded. Angry red swirls marched across a projected screen. “Another hour or so. Shouldn’t get any worse, though. Just straight-line winds. No tornadoes in the forecast.”

A loud creaking noise sounded from outside, followed by a long crash. Verity tensed. “You were saying?”

Springer tilted his head, consulting his radar. “Tree came down. None of them are close enough to the barn to hit it. We’ll be fine.”

“How’s the barn itself holding up?”

“I… may have mapped out all of the nails in the roof and the rafters. I’ll know if any of them pop.”

“Does the fact that you’re sitting up awake in the middle of the night reflect your assessment of its chances against the storm?”

“Nah. Just wanted to bring the solar panels in and get the fire going again. Seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Hm.” Satisfied with his answer, she closed her eyes and dozed off.

She dreamed.

* * *

 

She’s curled up in the backseat of Springer’s ground mode, half-asleep as the hail bangs off his roof like machinegun fire. Some interstate, sometime in the middle of the night, somewhere between Alaska and Nebraska, and he’s gliding along at 80 miles an hour, slicing through a hailstorm like it was nothing. Wipers thump a slow steady rhythm across his windshield, tires hum along the pavement, his weight presses through deeper standing water with ease, refusing to hydroplane. She hears the wind gust against him and can feel the stiff springs of his suspension rock against it. She curls deeper into her blanket, snug as warm air continues to pour out of his dash and lightning flickers all around him, illuminating the interior of his cabin in brief flashes. He is impervious to all elements; wind, rain, hail, lightning.

The outside world crashes against him.

Inside, he is a cocoon of warmth. Stable. Quiet.

Safe.

* * *

 

Flying through a river valley on a planet she can’t remember the name of. She’s strapped into the cockpit, snug in her armor, watching as the trees slide by below, orange against the red sun. Springer banks gently through the curves of the valley, and Verity feels the roll of his frame with every turn, eyelids growing heavy with sleep, the steady buzz of his rotors lulling her under.

* * *

 

Space.

Uncle Magnus’s ship.

She’s curled up in the webbing in the back of the cramped bridge, snug and secure. Magnus is at the helm as she watches the flicker of control lights flash around his silhouette, her view framed by the twin antennae on either side of his head.

The ship bucks beneath her and she realizes they’re flying through a storm. The bulkhead vibrates behind her in an unfamiliar cadence as Springer slides into the seat next to Magnus. They exchange a brief glance and the ship steadies under Springer’s hand as Magnus yields the controls.

Magnus thumbs the ship-wide comm. “All hands, brace for turbulence.”

Springer pulls the straps of his chair over his shoulders and buckles in. “Verity somewhere safe?”

Magnus ticks his head to the side. “She’s in the gear webbing behind us. She’s secure.”

Springer remains focused on what’s ahead. “Ok. Pick up forward guns. We have incoming asteroids.”

“Affirmative.”

Their conversation changes to low blurbs and bleeps, and she realizes they’ve switched to Cybertronian to make coms easier. She reaches for her helmet and puts it on so she can listen in on the translator. Their communication is seamless, coordinated, almost scripted, and Springer has even dropped his colloquial speech patterns for the moment. Their tone is steady, clipped but calm. She feels the bump of the blasters as Magnus fires on the asteroids in their path. She hears the smattering of their dust like rain against the windshield, and the view outside is nothing but an aura of particles and gas.

Her stomach churns as Springer announces an attitude change and turns the ship askew, compensating for shield damage by putting it on the leeward side through a dense patch of the field. The ship fights him, not designed for this angle of attack, and the yoke shakes in his hands. “C’mon baby… c’mon baby…” The words escape under his breath as he eases the ship back in line. “Atta girl.”

The ship bumps to the side with a dull thump, eliciting a surprised “Oops,” from Springer. The engines whine as he pushes it through harder chop.

“Don’t wreck my ship,” Magnus orders as he continues to fire through the last few asteroids.

Then, finally, the haze through the windshield fades back to ink black space as they clear the field and the ship settles back to its normal hum. The tension falls from Magnus’s shoulders and he and Springer exchange a smile, happy to have worked together on something that didn’t involve blood, guts, and killing, for once. Magnus nods at the triple changer. “Well done.”

* * *

 

Verity woke to find herself on the couch on the lower level of the barn, still wrapped in her blanket, at the center of a shaft of sunlight shining through the open door. Finding her slippers by the edge of the couch, she slid her feet into them and shuffled to the door.

The morning was cool and damp, and the smell of wet earth permeated her senses. Nonetheless, the bright sun, still air, and cloudless sky promised a warm day. The only evidence of the violence of the previous night’s storm was a few leaves scattered the yard and the tree that had fallen on the other side of the field. Otherwise, things looked fine. Birds chirped. Bees buzzed. Life went on.

She found Springer by the side of the barn, resetting a solar panel. The thing had to weigh a few hundred pounds, but he handled it with the same ease that she would handle a piece of cardboard. And yet, despite his otherworldly strength and power, the creases in the malleable metal of his face below his optics belied his weariness, bore witness to his exhaustion with his life as a soldier.

Ancient but powerful. Ancient, but capable of outliving her by millennia with ease.

When those optics met her gaze, she was struck by the thought of all he must have seen with them; all of the battles, all of the blood, all of the hurt.

“Morning, snore monster. You kept me up all goddamn night.”

Ah, yes. The gravitas that came with ancient warrior perspective.

She tightened the blanket around herself. “I do not snore.”

He tilted his head to the side, and then the sound of loud snoring, in full stereo, blasted from his integrated speakers.

“You recorded me?!”

“I collected evidence.”

“Uhhhhrrrrg…” She turned back towards the door.

“Get some breakfast and then help me re-wire this stuff. Your hands can get inside the junction boxes better than mine can.”

“Fine…”

She smiled. _He_ needed _her_ for something?

She’d take it.


	2. Who Needs Parents Anyway?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the discovery and loss of family, the balance of lives, and when to bale hay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it turns out I jumped the gun on a few things in some of my previous stories. Ah, the dangers of writing fanfic while the current cannon is still being written. If you've been following along, assume that everything I wrote before that *doesn't* conflict with cannon still happened, and conveniently forget everything else for this particular story. :)

_Recall the deeds as if they’re all_  
_Someone else’s atrocious stories_  
_Now you stand reborn before us all_  
_So glad to see you well…_  
_But I’m more than just a little curious_  
_How you’re planning to go about making your amends_  
_To the dead_

A Perfect Circle, [The Noose](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVXTmav24Wk)

* * *

“Nebraska seems… empty.”

Verity stirred from her doze in Springer’s passenger seat. “Yep. That’s the point, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Springer said, rolling eastbound along I-80. “I’m just… not used to it.”

“Wait… how long did you live on a space station? Surrounded by, y’know, empty space?”

“Heh. Debris was different. You _expected_ to be isolated out there. And it did orbit a planet. Whenever we _were_ on a planet, we usually weren’t too far from an urban area. Not like we were ever in one place for very long anyway.”

“How long has it been since you lived on Cybertron?”

“Since I _lived_ there? Huh… not since the Wreckers set up base on Debris. Couple thousand years or so I guess. I’ve been back a few times since, but it was hostile territory at the time, so it wasn’t the same.”

“What about now? Have you considered going back?”

“God, no. They elected Starscream… _Starscream_ , to run the place, and I just… can’t.”

Verity shifted to look out the window, watching the cornfields flow by, turning her thoughts over in her head. “Sometimes you really can’t go home again.”

“Maybe he’ll lose the next election,” Springer said, her adage flying right over his head. “Assuming he allows another one to happen. Maybe then I’ll think about it.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Verity continued to watch Nebraska slide by, thoughts of Arizona tugging at the corners of her mind. She took a breath and forced them out. “It’ll be interesting to see what kind of shape this barn is in.”

“I’ve lived in some strange places, but this’ll be the first time I’ve called a livestock shelter ‘home.’ At least you’ll be on the upper level where there haven’t been any… animals.”

Verity laughed. “The previous owner said he kept a bunch of cars in there. It should be fine. Think of it as more of a ‘hangar.’”

“Easy for you to say. Here’s our exit.”

Later, somewhere between I-80 and Broken Bow, they pulled off of the secondary highway and onto the gravel road that led to their new home. For two miles, the road cut a swath through acres of hay, waving lazily in the breeze, a cloud of dust following in Springer’s tracks. They reached their turnoff, passed through a crumbling wooden gate, and crested the rise.

Springer stomped on the brakes, sliding to a stop in the gravel, throwing Verity into the seatbelt.

“What… The…” Springer started.

“… Hell?” Verity finished.

A small Cybertronian shuttle was parked next to the barn.

“Goddammit,” Springer whispered under his breath.

“Who is it? Can you tell?”

“Prowl.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“We’re about to find out.”

Springer took the last half mile at a cautious pace. When they reached the yard, he stopped to let Verity out and transformed.

Prowl stepped out of the shuttle. “Driving all this way?”

“ _Someone_ made me turn over my jamming gear when I decommissioned. Passing myself off as a custom model goes over easier with the highway patrol than it does with the FAA. I see you got your optic fixed. Nice work.”

Prowl ignored the comment, turning toward the barn. “You’ve finally bought the farm.”

Springer thought maybe he saw a hint of a smile on Prowl’s face. He didn’t like it. “That supposed to mean something?”

“It does, actually.” Prowl turned back to face him. “Historically, U.S. military compensation to the families of dead soldiers would pay off the family farm.”

“You’re annoyed by the fact that I managed to buy an actual farm without actually dying for it.”

Prowl refused to take the bait. “Alaska not to your liking?”

“I had enough,” Verity said. “Cold got old. Time to move on.”

“Of course.”

“What are you doing here?” Springer asked.

“Housewarming gift. Come see for yourself.” Prowl led them around to the back of the shuttle and opened the cargo hatch.

Springer drew a long sigh. “A communication array. Having trouble letting me go?”

Prowl kept his optics on the array. “The universe is a dangerous place. That didn’t change when you dropped out. There’ve been some… incidents on Earth. You are not required to tune in, but if trouble comes your way, it’ll let you know. You are otherwise free to do with it whatever you please. You’ll only have general clearance access, of course.” He ended with a pointed look in Verity’s direction.

“Phhth…” She threw her hands in the air and walked to the edge of the hatch, getting a better look at the array. “I know all the Aequitas stuff. I know what really happened on Pova. I know Kup went nuts and killed a bunch of guys. I know you hijacked him after he was rescued. What else could there be?”

Again, that half-smile skirted over Prowl’s face. “You should ask Springer to tell you the story about Kup’s rescue.”

A split second later, he found Springer’s hand around his throat and his back slammed against the side of the shuttle.

Just as he had planned.

Springer’s face was inches from Prowl’s. “What. Is. _Wrong_ with you?” He grated the words over a private com.

Prowl replied in kind. “You’ve never had any problem reminding me how many people have died under my orders. I’m curious about how satisfied you are with how many have died under yours?”

“I carry that guilt with me. Every. Single. Day. Every one of their deaths weighs me down. I know a part of Kup hates me for it, and that _kills_ me. What else do you want?”

“You are living with an alien. Our relationship with her species is… tenuous at the moment. If she is to remain under your care, she deserves to know who you really are. I’m also curious about how much of yourself you’ve learned from her.”

Springer’s failure to suppress a look of confusion, however brief, was all the answer he needed.

“She still has a few secrets of her own, then. You deserve to know those, as well. Are we done here?”

Springer paused for a few more moments, optics blazing, considering how Prowl’s throat felt with his hand wrapped around it. Not entirely comfortable with how much he liked the position he was in, he let go and stepped back, only to catch the look on Verity’s face. Shocked, though maybe not surprised.

He would have some explaining to do.

Just as Prowl had planned.

* * *

 

A few days passed. Prowl left the array with Springer and Verity to install themselves, and they generally got settled in. The barn turned out to be livable enough, the upstairs living area reasonably well-furnished, and the ground level was spacious and surprisingly clean. In addition to the array, they set up a few solar panels and wind turbines. The plumbing in the barn drew water from the well. As far as utilities went, they were truly off the grid.

The wind and solar units were enough to power the array, appliances, and Springer. He found that non-combat temperate-climate life required much less wattage than he was used to, and that was fine. Verity got a library card and quickly maxed it out stocking the bookshelf. Springer’s account, several million years of accrued military pay, spliced into an American bank, easily covered groceries. He let Verity’s digs at him becoming a literal “grocery getter” slide. For now. He’d find a way to get her back later.

Life was comfortable.

Of course, Verity couldn’t let it stay too comfortable.

A metal ring half-buried in the yard served as an exceptional fire pit, and Verity had chosen the evening to indulge in s’mores to celebrate getting entirely moved-in and ship-shape. Discovering that ethanol was close enough to engex to serve in a pinch, Springer had chosen a several-liter bottle of bourbon to enjoy by the fire as well. He was about half-way through it when Verity broke the companionable silence.

“So. That story about Kup’s rescue.”

Springer breathed a long sigh. “You’re going to let Prowl play you like that? Play us?”

Verity held her hands up in surrender. “No judgment here, dude. I know you’ve been through some crazy stuff. But, I mean, you got Kup back. It all worked out in the end, right?”

“Not for a lot of people. Not for Guzzle.”

Confusion etched itself across Verity’s face. “Aggro roid-rage guy? Impactor had to put him down after he leveled his blasters at the back of Kup and Prowl’s heads. Said something about Kup killing his friends. Wait – that was true? He wasn’t just nuts and making up reasons to get all… shooty?”

“Yeah…” Springer was silent for a long time, trying to put it all together in a way that she would understand, wondering if there was a way to tell it honestly without coming off as a murderer himself, wondering if he even deserved a telling that would paint him as anything less. “He was nuts alright, but he wasn’t making anything up. Fifty Autobots died on that mission. A lot of them were his friends.”

Verity remained quiet, her face somber in the firelight, eyes on Springer’s optics.

“Most of them weren’t soldiers. They were scientists. They weren’t trained for search-and-rescue. They weren’t trained to go up against someone as skilled as Kup.”

“But you were. They helped you get him back.”

Springer had to bite his lip for several moments before he could continue. “No, they didn’t. I wasn’t even there. I just gave the orders to send them down when I was on my way to Ark-17. Only a few came back alive. Kup just… mowed the rest of them down. I wasn’t the one who got him back.”

Verity tilted her head in a silent question.

“Trailbreaker,” Springer continued. “He… he was an Outlier. He could generate force-fields. I had him brought in. He went down there and just wrapped Kup in a bubble, easy-peasy, and brought him back. If I had just _waited_ …” He looked at his fists, realizing they were clenched tight, and forced himself to open his hands. “That’s what Prowl wanted you to know, Verity.” His optics were still on his hands, unable to meet her gaze. “I’m not the hero you think I am. It’s my fault they’re all dead. It’s my fault that Guzzle’s dead. I’m just another Wrecker. I pretty much just leave a pile of destruction in my tracks. On balance, I’ve probably done about as much harm as good. When I was caught in the zero point, I realized I couldn’t tell if I was more a part of the solution or part of the problem. When I woke up, I decided to get out as soon as I could. So… here I am.” He looked up at the sky, at the smear of the Milky Way above him. “In the middle of a hay field, in the middle of a flyover state, on a backwater planet at the edge of a far-flung arm of the galaxy. Trying to keep myself out of the way.”

Verity was quiet for a long time before responding. “Does Kup know?”

“Yeah. I told him after Prowl pulled me back onboard Debris.”

“How’d he take it?”

“He punched me in the face.”

Verity nodded, but was otherwise quiet, processing this new information. The thing about Springer and Prowl was, you never quite knew where they drew the line, and they each drew them in very different places.

Now, Kup wasn’t a complex guy. You always knew where he stood. Once you got under the hood and figured out what made him tick, he was predictable.

But Springer and Prowl each had a complex moral compass, each with his own declination, and each interfered with the other when they were in close proximity. The problem was that Prowl knew exactly how Springer’s worked, could predict every move, but Springer was not nearly as adept at predicting Prowl. They both knew this. Not a lot of things infuriated Springer, but this was one of them, and it was evident in his expression right now.

“So that’s the deep dark secret that Prowl baited you into telling me?”

“Yeah. Feel free to judge all you want.” Springer’s tone had grown bitter, his gaze cast somewhere over the field in the darkness.

“Seems like you’ve done enough of that already,” Verity said. “You’re obviously not ok with it. You wouldn’t be you if you _were_ ok with it. If my opinion means anything, all I can really say is that I won’t hold it against you. As long as you don’t throw fifty lives away on my behalf, I’ll call it good.”

His optics slid back to her eyes and he fixed her with a silent stare for a brief moment. “They would be well-spent, depending on whose lives they were.”

A chill swept through her as she once more recognized the millennia of war-torn hardness behind those optics, hit with the realization that he’d already done the math on the worth of her life, just as he’d done it on the lives of everyone who’d ever served and died under him, just as he’d done it on Kup’s life, just as he’d done it on his own life. The realization that it wasn’t the _number_ of lives lost to Kup causing the problem; Springer would’ve thrown hundreds, maybe thousands at him if that’s what it really would have taken, the weight of Kup’s value pulling so heavily on the scales of Springer’s mind. The problem was that, in this case, lives hadn’t been the real price. In this case, it had only come down to putting someone with the right skills in the right place.

Everything else had been wasted to Springer’s own impatience.

Uncomfortable with the implications of several tons of giant alien robot cost-benefit analysis sitting before her, she broke his gaze, looking instead at the fire, searching for the right response. “Well… fifty Prowls, maybe. I won’t feel bad about that.”

The ice finally dropped from Springer’s expression, warmth returning to take the edges off his near-constant weariness. “Deal.” He took a long pull of the bourbon, wondering about Prowl’s other dig, wondering what he’d meant by what he’d learned of himself from Verity, wondering if he dared to even bring it up. After a few moments of internal debate, he finally went for it. “In keeping with this evening’s theme of Prowl outing my dark history and your habit of knowing top-secret information, he mentioned that you had something on me that even _I_ don’t know about. Care to enlighten me?”

Verity took a deep breath, unsure of how to proceed, unsure if an existential crisis was what Springer really needed right now. In the end, she came to the same conclusion that Prowl had – Springer deserved to know. “Do you remember being created?”

Springer shook his head. “Some of us do. A lot of us take enough damage that our early memories get deleted. I fall into the second group. My earliest memory is getting Autobranded, and it’s still spotty for a while after that.”

Verity nodded. “We don’t remember being born, either. Our brains aren’t developed well enough to really record anything long-term. My earliest memory is… is from when I was about four years old. Anyway, it’s normal to not remember for you too, right?”

“Sure, under the circumstances.”

“Do you know if you were forged or constructed cold?”

Springer suppressed a frown, reminding himself that Verity likely didn’t understand the vaguely bigoted nature of her question and how heavily the matter had weighed on him after the Aequitas trials. “My record says forged, but again, I don’t remember my protoform phase. And don’t ask anyone else that. Constructed cold has… some negative connotations. Unfairly.”

Verity nodded, seeming to suppress a frown of her own. “I haven’t seen any other Autobot triple changers. Are you the only one?”

“Sandstorm and Broadside are the other two. So, yeah, we’re pretty rare. We’re also all vitreous-positive sparktypes, along with Whirl, which is also uncommon. What’s this all have to do with what I don’t know?”

Verity was quiet for a few moments, gauging Springer’s expression with the greatest care she could manage. “You weren’t forged.”

Springer’s head tilted slightly to the side, optics narrowed. Then he laughed. “So I’m constructed cold? That’s it? _That’s_ the big secret?” Springer shook his head. “Prowl thought I’d be upset about that? I know he thinks I’m a gashole, but I didn’t think he thought I was a _sparkist_ gashole.”

“You weren’t constructed cold, either.”

He laughed again. “So… what… I budded fully-formed out of Kup’s forehead?”

“What happened to you in the Tor? How did you survive that explosion?”

He stopped laughing. “What’s that have to do with anything?”

“Just humor me. Those charges detonated and destroyed everything except you, despite the fact that you were in there right next to them. We know because Debris’s radar records don’t show you leaving. How did that happen?”

Springer sat back, trying to recall the chain of events. “I was laying the charges, repeating the call-and-response with Impactor. After a while, I wasn’t getting his responses, so I sent him one last message to stick to the plan, and kept sending my end of the call. A few seconds later, Tarantulas came down throwing the charges off. I tried to take him out, but then he kicked me out of the Tor. I jumped back in and… it was so _loud_ in there… I was shouting, he was shouting. I couldn’t hear him, so I doubt he could hear me. Didn’t matter… shouting is just what you do when you’re stabbing someone or when you’re getting stabbed, so… I was the one doing the stabbing, but it’d gotten really hard to send the call. Last thing I remember I was on Tarantulas’s back, hilt-deep through his armor with my saber, screaming ‘Wreck’ with everything I had, and…” He spread his hands. “Everything went white. Then it all went dark. Next thing I knew I was stumbling through a paint bucket on bad circuit boosters. After what felt like half a million years, Prowl came through the gate and hauled me out.” He sighed. “That’s it.”

“When Tarantulas kicked you out, he was trying to save you.”

“What?”

“While you were setting the charges, we were keeping Tarantulas occupied at the top. He got into it with Prowl over… well, over what seemed like Prowl murdering his son. His creation. Someone called Ostaros.”

Springer showed no signs of recognition. “Ooookaayyy…?”

“Impactor fessed up to pushing Tarantulas through the gate into the Noisemaze on Prowl’s orders. He was also supposed to kill Ostaros, but he didn’t do it. Tarantulas figured out that Prowl wouldn’t have killed him because he doesn’t do _anything_ on his own, and then…”

Verity paused, making sure she had Springer’s full attention. Indeed, he was leaning forward, the firelight catching the hollows below his optics, which were focused directly on her. She continued.

“And then we heard you repeat your end of the call-and-response. Prowl and Impactor looked at each other like they knew the answer to Tarantulas’s question about what happened to Ostaros. Springer…” She looked up to the ancient alien before her, wondering how the responsibility of telling him about his origins from several million years ago had fallen to her, wondering how someone with her lifespan, who should otherwise be so insignificant to him, a mere flash in the pan, would be the one to tell him that he wasn’t who he thought he was, that the origins of his life were a lie, that he was built by a monster.

“What are you telling me, Verity?”

“You’re Ostaros. Tarantulas created you.”

“So, Prowl and Impactor exchanged a meaningful glance when they heard my voice and that means Tarantulas created me.” Springer’s voice was laced with cynicism.

“Prowl and I had to beat a hasty retreat with the obteneum at the moment, but I asked him on the way out. He confirmed it. Tarantulas created you. And he was overwhelmed with joy when he found out that you were alive.”

Springer’s expression was frozen, staring vacantly into the fire. The only indication of his comprehension was the slow squeal of the glass bottle of bourbon in his hand before it shattered in his grip. He looked at his hand, undamaged from the glass. “Sonofabitch.”

“I’m sorry, Springer.”

“I was built by a monster.”

“I was saved by the same monster. He saved you too. That’s the only way you could have survived that. Think about it – did he fight back against you?”

Springer paused, trying to recall anything that Tarantulas did to harm him in the Tor. Coming up blank, he shook his head. “No.”

“See? He must have saved you, somehow.”

“But he didn’t make it. I helped destroy him. He was still functioning despite whatever Arcee and Impactor did to him. I was the one who killed him… I was the one who laid the charges. I was the one who ran him through with a saber. I annihilated my own creator.”

“Because he was… y’know… a monster. You did the right thing, Springer. He saved us, but that doesn’t make up for all of the bad things he did and would’ve continued to do. The world is better off without him, and you made it that way. I call that a win.”

Springer looked at his hands, then brought the left up to his chest to rub just below his shoulder, almost as if to push through it and extract his own spark to get a better look at it. “Is that what’s been wrong with me the whole time? Why Kup trained me personally? Why Impactor almost killed me? Why Prowl was constantly in my face? Because they all knew what I was? Because they all knew I was a fake?”

Verity shrugged. “I can’t speak for those guys, but as far as I’m concerned, you’re more real to me than just about anyone else I’ve ever known.” She hesitated as Springer once more locked his optics on her. “If… that means anything, coming from a human.”

Springer let her words sink in for a moment before replying. “It does, Verity. Thank you.” He rose from his seated position on the ground. “I… need to be alone for a while. Don’t wait up.”

“Ok…” Verity watched as Springer turned and walked away from the circle of light cast by the fire and disappeared into the darkness of the hayfield beyond the barn. Several minutes later, the surrounding trees burst forth with the birds that had been roosting there for the night, the sound of their chirping and fluttering spreading in all directions. The yip and howl of coyotes rose in the distance. And at the edge of her mind, just beyond the highest and lowest limits of her hearing, she thought she detected an eerie, multi-tonal shriek, completely alien in its dissimilarity to anything she had ever heard before.

Springer was screaming.

* * *

 

_Kup –_

_Verity spilled the beans about me being created by Tarantulas. If you didn’t already know… uh… Surprise! But something tells me you do. I just… wanted you to know that I knew. And to thank you for training me up despite what I was. That must have been a huge risk for you. I hope I made it pay off._

_About Tsiehshi… again, I’m sorry. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I know you can’t give it because I know I don’t deserve it. I just want you to know it’s on my mind. I know I failed you. I won’t make that mistake again._

_We headed south to Nebraska. I’ve included our coordinates. You’re welcome to swing by if you’re on Earth and get a chance. It’s nice and quiet here. Decent number of stars in the sky at night, for how far out this planet is on the edge of the galaxy. I discovered a new beverage – bourbon. I think you’d like it._

_Stay out of trouble, old man._

_-Springer_

Kup filed the message away, unable to look at it any longer, but also unable to delete it.

He didn’t know how much time it would take for him to be able to respond to it.

For so long, Springer had been his pride and joy. His star pupil. His protégé. Losing him to the Wreckers had cut deep. Watching him grow more and more complacent with their methods had added to that wound, so it was with a fair amount of relief that Kup had listened to Springer’s testimony against Impactor. It was with a fair amount of satisfaction that Kup had read the (real and classified) Wrecker’s mission reports as they became less abusive and more effective under Springer’s command, even if they retained their necessary brutality.

Kup had always known that Springer was capable of tremendous violence. Strength, speed, intelligence, charisma, wit… all of it. The responsibility of focusing all of those talents in the right direction had fallen to him, and he thought he had done a decent job of it. Springer came to him as a diamond in the rough, to boot. Honing and polishing him down to a capable and honorable soldier had been a delight, if not his life’s crowning achievement.

Never in a million years would he have guessed that Springer was capable of the level of stupidity he had displayed at Tsiehshi.

Where had Kup gone wrong?

He thought back over his years of training Springer. He had instructed his pupil at great lengths about the value of the lives that would someday be under his command. Knowing Springer’s tendency towards impatience, he had schooled him, over and over, to stop and consider all possible options. He had repeatedly cautioned against the use of brute force and dubious ethics, warning that such practices had a tendency to be repaid with interest.

What had he missed?

The answer was clear enough, once he allowed himself to get past his own modesty: Springer idolized him. Of all the things he had cautioned against, he had neglected to caution Springer against giving him preferential treatment. The necessity had never occurred to him. He had simply never expected Springer to throw away everything he had ever taught him on his own behalf.

They were _both_ morons, then.

Inasmuch as Springer had thrown the scientists of Ark-17 at him, he himself had somehow led Springer to believe that was the right thing to do. And he himself had slain every single one.

He got up and left his quarters. He had better things to do tonight than regret the past.

* * *

 

_Hey kid,_

_Yeah, I knew about the Tarantulas thing. I didn’t know his name at the time. Prowl just gave me the broad strokes an’ swore me to secrecy. You know how that goes._

_Prime’s keepin’ me busy._

_Trouble finds me. You know how that goes, too. I’ll be fine._

_Say hi to Verity for me._

_-Kup_

Springer read Kup’s response projected from the array. Three weeks had passed since Springer had sent his message. Looking at the timestamps in the header, he saw that three hours had passed from when Kup had started writing his response and when he had sent it.

Three hours to write fifty-seven words.

Springer’s gaze dropped to his feet. Reading between the lines was easy on this one: _Leave me alone._ He powered the array off for the evening.

Hearing his heavy sigh, Verity called from her room. “What’s up?”

He paused in mid-turn, his back to her door. “Kup says hi.”

He went outside to the yard, lay down on his back, laced his fingers behind his head, and gazed up at the stars.

Kup’s rejection, while not entirely a surprise, stung like a hornet.

It wasn’t all about Kup either. Now that the secret of Tseshi was out, the stinger had opened a slow leak in the barrier that Springer had built around it in his mind. Now that Kup knew and (understandably) refused to render aid to that wound in the form of acceptance, Springer knew it would eventually flood him, consume him with the guilt of fifty lives lost to his own impatience.

Not one to sit passively while something stung him, Springer finally faced the wound head-on and considered what it would take to fix it. How could he make up for what he had done?

He knew the answer was not in handling Kup directly. His gut tightened as he imagined his old mentor’s voice. _It’s not me you killed, kid. It’s what you did to **them**. It’s what you did with your own command. They trusted you and you threw ‘em away. They were barely means to an end, and that’s not how I taught you to treat your soldiers._

Springer suddenly understood the depth of Kup’s disappointment with his joining the Wreckers: the willingness to play dirty. The willingness to do the wrong things, even if for the right reasons. The willingness to throw everything that Kup had taught him about honor and character out the window and move a step closer to becoming the evil you were trying to fight. And the likelihood that one step would become two, then five, then a mile…

The whole Wrecker’s philosophy was the damn problem, and Springer had given up denying that he was part of that problem the day he ratted on Impactor. That he hadn’t realized it until he was on the receiving end of it had become a thorn in the side of his conscience ever since. Taking the Wreckers in a different direction, cracking down on warcrime behavior, benching members when they became too big of a liability, had eased the pain a little.

But it hadn’t been enough.

It hadn’t stopped him from being reckless with others’ lives.

The Wreckers were mostly a group of inherently violent people. Put them all in one place and it was no wonder things had gone bad. It was no wonder it all blew back in their faces in the form of Squadron X.

What would happen with a different kind of team?

Springer’s mind drifted to Trailbreaker, spark aching at the thought of his demise. He had deserved so much better, a place where his faults would have been recognized as inherent with his gifts, a place where he would have been truly appreciated.

How many more of him were out there? How many had talents that were both a blessing and a curse, who would benefit from mentoring that would guide them down the right path?

Springer’s optics flashed as the idea solidified in his mind: this is how he would make it up. This would be his legacy in Kup’s honor. Find the adepts who needed help. Provide them with the same mentoring that Kup had provided him, but with one crucial difference, a difference that he only had the benefit of knowing because of his own shortcomings:

The importance of accepting themselves for who they were, and the importance of accepting him as something less than perfect.

* * *

 

Springer stood at the edge of the hayfield, the late-summer sun beating down on his armor and the cicadas droning in their up-and-down buzz. He examined the crop before him, cross-referencing with the weather report he had pulled from the array earlier in the morning. The hay was ready. There had been no rain for the past three days, and there would be no more for the next four. If there was ever a good time for a third cut, it was now. Verity had established contact with a nearby farmer who had cut, baled, and purchased the first two cuts. He turned back to the barn, already composing their message to the farmer in his head when he heard Verity’s cry.

He broke into a run.

She fell silent when he skidded through the open door, ducking his head to clear the frame, a cloud of dust following his momentum inside. “What’s…?” When his optics found her, sitting intact and uninjured before the array, he tilted his head. “What’s wrong?” While she was physically ok, he noted the redness of her eyes and the tears streaming down her face. She was obviously not emotionally ok.

She sniffed, running an ineffectual hand along her face to dry the tears. “Can I just cry, please? Without having to answer any questions?”

Springer brought his own reactions under control, stifling his alarm, automatically falling into Commander Mode. “Sure, for now. We’ll talk about it when you’re ready.”

She turned away from him, returning her attention to the array. “Fine.”

Evening arrived, and Verity sat on the couch on the ground level of the barn, picking at her dinner, a large wooden cable spool serving as a table. Springer sat on the floor facing her, shoulders propped against a support beam, the barn door behind him closed against the chill of the coming night.

Springer held a container of energon in his hands, distilled from the solar and wind generators they had installed. He’d paced his consumption of it based on Verity’s rate of eating her dinner, and it had been slow going. His appetite finally got the better of him and he took a long pull. Returning his attention to her, he broke the silence.

“So.”

Verity looked up from her plate. Then looked back down. “I called Zeke. He’ll come by to cut the hay tomorrow. He’ll come back to bale it on Friday. Should be dry enough by then.”

“Thank you.” Springer took another pull of energon. “What else happened this morning?”

“I didn’t mean for you to hear me. I’m sorry.”

“For future reference,” Springer tapped the crest of his helm. “I can literally hear a pin drop a mile away. I know it takes a lot to rattle you. Something you saw on the array managed to do it, and as far as I can tell, nothing on the Autobot channels did it. What’s up?”

Verity set her fork down. “I found my mom.”

The hardness in Springer’s features softened. “Oh.”

Verity shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Is she… alive?”

“Yeah.”

“Is she… ok?”

“Yeah, actually. Looks like she’s… doing well.”

“How did you find her?”

“Facebook. A lot of her posts are open.”

“Did you contact her?”

“No. Not yet.”

“What’s stopping you?”

Verity lifted her eyes to Springer’s optics, and he recognized the hardness he saw there. “Twenty years of separation. Maybe that’s not a lot to you, but to me…”

“It’s eighty percent of your life so far. I get it.”

“Yeah, well…” She shrugged and picked up her fork again. “I’m not ready.”

“That’s fair.” Springer lowered his gaze to the energon in his hands, reflecting on her estrangement from her mother and his own apparent estrangement from Kup. They both had their dark places, their own wounds. He had a millennia’s worth of hardships he kept from her – no need to burden her with them. She likely felt the same way about keeping her own troubles from him. They were only entitled to the information about each other that pertained to their well-being and security here and now. Anything else was voluntary bonus. He titled the glass of energon in his hand, watching the iridescent swirl of blue. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

Verity picked at the broccoli on her plate. “Thanks.” She eventually finished her dinner in silence and went upstairs to bed.

* * *

 

Summer passed. Fall brought a fourth and final cut of hay. For the first time in a very long time, Verity celebrated a proper Thanksgiving, with enough turkey to last her through to Christmas. Springer hung multi-colored lights all over the inside and outside of the barn. Knowing that winter would be long and cold, they gave each other books for the holiday to pass the time. He gave her a collection of Cybertronian pre-war literature that he had translated himself and she gave him Isaac Asimov’s Robot and Foundation series. Springer busied himself with finding new recruits, accessing personnel files for those with the right fit, composing the pitch, assembling the team. Verity read up on agriculture science, planting, irrigation, fertilization. Spring arrived with the slow inertia of the northern Midwest, and they decided to rotate a crop of wheat for the year.

The outside world churned around them, and with few exceptions, they kept in touch with it as little as possible.

The peace was nice. Springer handled the isolation well enough, knowing that this little patch of seclusion would be a relatively small oasis in the chaos of his life, so he took it while he could get it. Verity kept her visits to town to a minimum; it was enough that she was known as the woman who lived by herself in a barn and drove around in a weird military vehicle. Oh, if they only knew the truth!

In the back of his mind, Springer wondered when they day would come that he would wake up and Verity would be gone, off on the next phase of her life, maybe ready to re-join human society, maybe even ready to see her mom. He’d come to accept that it was a question of “when” and not “if.” It was, after all, what she did. She had left Hunter and Jimmy to travel the galaxy with Ultra Magnus. She had then left Magnus, choosing to join the fight with the Wreckers at Garrus-9 over coming back to Earth. Someday she would grow tired of farming and reading alien historical fiction and leave him as well. He had resolved not to take it personally, understanding that her life was short, and while he could easily meet her needs for safety and stability now, she would eventually grow out of those and need other things that he, as a giant alien robot, could not provide. Someday, as she marched down what remained of her truncated, 80-year lifespan, that day would come, and he would sell the farm he had so easily bought, call in a favor for a lift with someone who had a shuttle handy, and give more direct attention to the second generation of Wreckers.

His plan for that bridge solved in his mind, he set it aside, ready for the day he would have to cross it.

As it turned out, he would cling desperately to that bridge sooner than he realized.

* * *

 

Verity’s stomach sank as she read the bulletin, biting the middle knuckle of the first finger on her left hand to keep from screaming, mindful of Springer’s acute hearing even as he tinkered with one of the wind turbines outside.

Kup was dead.

Murdered at what was supposed to be a diplomatic meeting.

How was she going to tell Springer? What would he do? How would he react?

She sat back and sighed. She knew how deep Springer’s connection to Kup ran. Kup meant more to him than anyone else in the universe. This was completely over her head, and there was no way that it was going to end well, no matter what she did.

Better to just let things run their course.

She descended the stairs and pushed the big barn door open just enough so she could squeeze through out to the chilly spring afternoon, rain threatening on the horizon. She walked through the field to where Springer stood in the middle of it, attention focused on the guts of the turbine.

“T’sup?” His greeting edged out around the wrench he held in his teeth as his fingers continued to make adjustments.

“How much more work do you have to do on that thing?”

He paused to remove the wrench from his mouth, turning his attention to her. “I’ll be done in about half an hour. Why?”

She shrugged, maintaining an air of casualness. “There’s some news on the array you should see, but it’ll keep.” She turned back. “Finish up here. I’ll leave it on for you.”

He watched her walk away for several moments, wondering. Knowing it couldn’t be good or she just would’ve told him. Knowing it was nothing he could do anything about, or she would’ve told him to hurry back. Knowing the sooner he got this turbine fixed, the sooner he would get it all figured out, so he turned back to his work.

* * *

 

She watched as he scrolled through the bulletin, the glyphs reflecting off of the panes of his optics. She stood by the door, not entirely aware of her instinct to be ready for escape, watching as he drew a sharp breath and a grimace settled firmly over his features. The hollows under his optics, the shadows that weren’t there before Garrus-9 but had firmly etched themselves in throughout the course of the Noisemaze mission, stood out with firm weariness, now.

She watched as confusion, sorrow, and rage all passed over his face; watched as he stuffed each one of them down in turn. She watched as the rest of his frame appeared to remain neutral, as if he was afraid to let his emotions spread to the rest of it, as if he did not dare to let anything slip out of control. She watched as he cleared the static from his voice a few times, as if he was about to say something, watched as he hesitated, watched as his mouth closed once more. Watched as he entered more commands into the array, looking for more of the back-story, searching for answers, trying desperately to shine a spotlight onto the reasons for the death of his mentor.

Rain began to spatter on the roof of the barn. A moment later, it began to pound.

Springer’s thoughts refused to gain traction. Kup… wasn’t supposed to die. And he definitely wasn’t supposed to die like _this_. If he was going to clock out, it was going to be up against insurmountable odds, Kup against hundreds, maybe thousands, the fate of worlds hanging in the balance, his final end brought about by nothing short of a planet-igniting detonation, the blood of his sacrifice irrigating the survival of generations thereafter.

But sure as hell not betrayed at a conference table.

And sure as hell not by a single alien on Cybertron itself.

Kup deserved better.

So, so much better.

No longer able to trust himself, Springer stepped back from the array and headed for the door, barely noticing Verity skirt his feet as he slid it open. He stepped outside into the rain, and kept walking down the drive.

“Where are you going?” Verity shouted after him.

“I don’t know.”

“When will you be back?”

He paused, letting the rain batter him from all sides. “Give me twenty-four hours.”

* * *

 

Mid-day traffic was sparse. No one else in rural Nebraska had anywhere to be on a rainy afternoon, and that was just fine.

He didn’t even need to go all that fast.

He just wanted to be alone.

Awash in the rain, wipers thumping over his windshield, blanketed by the dull gray sky above, Springer realized how profoundly alone he was.

He had lost the Wreckers. Most of them were dead; most of the rest who were alive were on a distant ship that might never return; the newbies were… new, and he’d never really met them. He had lost contact with the world outside of his own head for five years. When he came back from that, he had exiled himself on a far-flung mudball, relegating himself to the life of an alien refugee, a tiny, squishy, short-lived organic for his only friend. And now he had lost his mentor, murdered on a planet he was born to but hadn’t called “home” in ages.

He had nothing left.

He had no one to call.

Not that Verity wasn’t great. She was, in her own way. But in all the time he had worried about meeting her needs, he’d never stopped to consider that she could never meet _his_ , even if it was through no fault of her own. She simply lacked a Cybertronian perspective. Because he could take forms that were vaguely familiar to her and speak her language, she often forgot that she was still completely alien to him, and a countless number of their conversations were peppered with him reminding her that “it doesn’t quite work the same way for us.”

He knew she would think of him losing Kup as the loss of his father. A figure who, as far as he could tell in best-case scenarios, would provide for a child he had helped to create, maybe teach it a few things himself, but largely send to others for training until they were adults and then send them off into the world to start their own lives.

Kup had been so much more.

Kup had been his mentor, raising Springer in his own image, teaching him everything he knew. To come from Kup’s training regimen was to boast of a proud lineage that included Optimus Prime himself. Kup had been his colleague, alternating between being his commander and being under his command. And beyond all of that, perhaps most importantly, Kup had been his friend. Someone he could bounce ideas off of, someone he could confide in, someone who had seen absolutely everything there was to see and who therefore understood everything Springer had gone through. Even if he didn’t have a solid answer for everything, he could tell you where to shine the light, tell you it was ok to be searching, tell you it was ok to not feel awesome about all the terrible things that life threw at you. Acknowledge that sometimes life beat you down, and it was ok to stay down for a little while, let yourself rest up, get yourself ready for the moment you would come roaring back and tear it up.

And now he was gone.

And the world felt so empty without him.

And the highway continued to spool out before him, a thin ribbon of empty, rain-slicked asphalt.

Had it really come to this? Had it all been for nothing? All of the lives Springer had banked against the worth of Kup’s, balanced on the assumption that Kup would live for at least another few million years, bestow the benefits of his wisdom and grit for all that time, save hundreds of thousands of lives over the ones spent to save him, cut short to merely a decade of borrowed time?

To be sure, Kup had done more with those ten years than most did in their entire lives. But the one thing he hadn’t done, the one thing Springer had needed most from him over the last two years, was to get back in touch. Springer knew Kup had been on Earth… been here and not so much as dropped a line.

It could only mean one thing.

Kup had died without forgiving him for the events on Tsiehshi. Kup had, in all likelihood, died still hating him for it.

The last thought was simply too much to bear, so Springer stuffed it down entirely, shutting it out, shutting everything out. Thinking only of the rain against his armor and the empty road before him.

* * *

 

Sometime in the middle of the night, Springer found himself back at the barn, not really remembering where he’d been or how he’d gotten back, not really remembering when the rain had stopped. He slid the door open; finding the interior lights off, he switched to infrared so as not to not wake Verity by turning them on, hearing her light snoring from her room on the upper level. Rolling the door shut, he turned and shifted once more to his ground form, parking his frame to rest on four tires for the most comfortable option for long nights on the concrete floor.

Verity had left the array in standby, and he issued a command to power it up in radio-link mode. No longer having access to full duty rosters, he submitted a blind query: was there currently anyone in North America who he had previously served at least ten years with?

The answer came back immediately.

Impactor.

Goddammit.

He relaxed his parameters – two years, anyone on the planet? Several more names popped up, but none were really who he needed. In a last-ditch effort, he queried Arcee’s location: en-route to Cybertron from Earth. He’d just missed her.

Maybe that was for the best.

Impactor it was, then. Getting in touch would take time – he was currently under-cover and not entirely under anyone’s specific command. Springer didn’t care to guess what that meant, considering himself lucky for the minor miracle that Impactor had left a communication cipher in the system at all. He entered a generic contact request, knowing it was best to include as little detail as possible, knowing it would be a while before he would get a generic confirmation, if he ever got one at all.

Of all the people in the world with any links at all to his past, Impactor was the only one left.

If Springer was the only Autobot to recognize Verity as victim of abuse, it was because of the abuse he himself had suffered at Impactor’s hand.

At the barrel of Impactor’s blaster.

Planted firmly in his own back.

Goddammit.

He had to get over this.

He reminded himself of more recent times, of Impactor guarding him against Carnivac as he lay paralyzed and helpless in the snow, of Impactor trying to talk him out of a suicide mission at Tarantulas’s lair. If Verity thought of Kup as his father, she probably thought of Impactor as an older fraternity brother; one who had thrown him around early on under the guise of having him prove his worth but really just to see how much he could take, then maybe regretted some of it later. One who was a strong proponent of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and who had stopped just short of killing him.

But when the rest of your family was gone, you had to make do with what was left.

And Impactor was all he had left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did want to note that this is not a commentary on how Magdalene Visaggio wrote Kup’s death in Schismatic. She was given the kill order by the publisher and did about as well as possible given the storyline, I think. If the management was so bound and determined to kill Kup, there were other, more appropriate opportunities to do so elsewhere, but instead they backed Visaggio into an impossible corner. 
> 
> Ok, so maybe it was, unconsciously, a commentary about the overall management decision. But not a dig against Visaggio. I do want to make that clear.


	3. My Own Personal Terminator

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the differences between Human and Cybertronian.

_A child within_  
_Has healing ways_  
_It sees me through_  
_My darkest days_

The Verve, [Catching the Butterfly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-kpSpzobkY)

* * *

Sometimes, Verity couldn’t sleep.

It didn’t happen very often these days. Nebraska was, by its very nature, removed from most everything, which was exactly how they wanted it. But sometimes a storm would roll through at night, challenging the barn’s structure, creating a racket in the process, but it always pulled through, and its occupants would return to their slumber.

But other times it was just plain old restlessness, and given its low frequency, that was ok, too.

Tired of staring into the darkness, she turned on the lamp at her nightstand, slid her feet into her slippers, pulled the blanket around her shoulders, and padded out onto the open, elevated hallway that looked out into the front of the barn’s lower level.

Looking down, she saw the smooth curve of light that was the reflection of her nightstand light off of Springer’s windshield. He was in his ground mode, the most comfortable way for him to sleep on a concrete floor without a Cybertronian-built circuit slab. The light from her room caught a few of his edges, sharp planes of airfoils, the sweep of a cowling, a sparkle of chrome, but he was otherwise shrouded in darkness. She snuck her hand out of the blanket for a brief wave, and the gesture was returned with a brief flash of his parking lights, translating roughly to, “Hey, yeah, I’m aware of you on an unconscious level but I’m in the middle of shutdown here, so don’t expect me to be any more responsive than that unless you actually need something.” She gave him a brief thumbs-up before turning to the array and powering it up to local mode, turning on a single screen and putting on a headset so as to disturb Springer as little as possible.

Her mind dwelling on the slumbering machine behind her, she finally realized what was really keeping her up, and she began to type.

* * *

_Prowl,_

_I’m curious._

_I’ve done some reading on zero-point states. Everything indicates that they’re sudden. They don’t come on gradually._

_Springer was still responsive after Overlord tore his face off at G-9. He wasn’t_ coherent _, but he was_ responsive _, at least until Perceptor sedated him._

_I should know. The memory of the sounds he was making before Perceptor put him under keeps me up at night._

_Everything also indicates that Springer’s the only one to recover from a zero-point. Yeah, there was that thing about Uncle Magnus, but I know about the multiple load-bearers. One of them died of it just like everyone else._

_And his method of recovery? Kup shouting him awake over the com? The same Kup whose brain you hijacked? The same Kup who happened to be able to break into your quarters and trigger your message about sending Springer to rescue you?_

_I’m gonna lay all the cards right out, here. With the exception of Mesothulas, you’ve had more access to Springer’s inner workings than anyone else. Springer’s been a thorn in your side from the start, and when you finally had the chance to put him on ice, you took it. You induced the zero-point. You got him out of the way. Until you needed him again. You could’ve killed him, but you didn’t. You set it up so that when you needed Springer, Kup could wake him up. You kept that backdoor open; even if you couldn’t access it directly, whatever you did to Kup made it so that he could._

_In other words, you attacked Springer when he was at his weakest, just so you could squirrel him away like a nut for when you needed him to save your sorry ass._

_I see you, Prowl. I see you for who you are._

_Lucky for me I’m not so easily programmed._

_-Verity_

* * *

Verity turned over in her-half doze in the sun, squinting up from her place on the flat surface of Springer’s thigh to see him with one hand behind his head as he rested in the open doorframe of the barn, his other hand holding the copy of _Foundation and Empire_ she had given him for Christmas. “You’re reading that _again_? This is what… your third time through the series?”

Springer’s optics peered at her over the top edge of the book, and she could just make out the corners of his grin. “Yeah, but it’s so much more fun when you know who the Mule really is.”

Verity groaned, rolling so her back was to the sun. “I bet Dors is your favorite character of the whole thing.”

“I _love_ Dors,” Springer replied without a trace of sarcasm. “Relentless protector. Good with bladed weapons. What’s not to love?”

Verity laughed, noting how he’d picked out two of the qualities he shared with the character, but managed to not mention the most obvious one. She wondered if his omission was on purpose, and if so, how directly she should poke at it. She went for an indirect route via the other Asimov series, knowing he’d been through that one twice so far. “So what’s your opinion of the Three Laws of Robotics, anyway?”

Springer closed the book and lowered his hands to the floor. He normally would’ve folded them in his lap, but he would’ve sliced Verity open with the stabilizer mounted on his forearm if he’d done so, given her current position. Whether or not he was explicitly conscious of observing Asimov’s First Law with that very gesture, she was not certain. He shrugged a shoulder. “I suppose, from a human perspective, they’re a good set of heuristics for human-built AI. Seems like all the sci-fi with robots that _don’t_ live by those rules ends pretty badly for the humans.”

“And from a giant alien robot perspective?”

Springer’s gaze dropped. “ _Don’t hurt humans. Do what humans tell you unless it’ll hurt other humans. Protect yourself unless doing so hurts or disobeys humans._ It’s just another form of slavery. The word _robot_ itself… it’s the Czech word for _slave_.”

Verity sat up, her drowsiness suddenly gone, wondering how many times she had used that word for him, knowing it was more than a handful. “I’m sorry, Springer. I didn’t actually know that.”

He shrugged again. “I figured you didn’t.”

“Does Cybertron have a history of slavery?”

Springer tilted his head, pondering the translations, not sure if they quite matched up. “Not in the sense of ownership, entirely. But sort of in terms of forced labor, yeah. Funcitonism used to be a thing – the idea that your occupation was determined by your alt mode, and you were bound to perform that occupation even if it was terrible or you didn’t happen to like it. If a drill bit was part of your anatomy, you were stuck being a miner and all of the associations that came with it. Low pay, crappy rations, that kind of thing. Didn’t matter if you also happened to be an excellent poet – you hauled raw energon out of the ground for a living instead.”

“Miner-poets?”

Springer lifted an optic ridge at the disbelieving tone in Verity’s voice. Then, he said simply, “Megatron.”

“Whaaaaaaat?”

“Pick your jaw up off the floor. Yeah, Megatron started out as a miner. He also happened to be a pretty decent poet, but with the whole Functioinist thing… they pressed him too hard, one thing led to another, and we wound up with a planetary war for millions of years. All because people were forced to do what corresponded to their alt mode, even if they were decent at other things.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I shit you not. Megatron and Impactor were friends back in their miner days. You haven’t lived until you’ve listened to Impactor get hammered and stumble around quoting anti-Functionist rhymes. On a space station. Where you can’t escape it.”

“I’ve got to hear this.” Verity’s eyes were wide with shock. “Lay it on me. Let’s hear one of Megatron’s greatest anti-oppression hits.”

“Oh, man…” Springer leaned his head back, trying to recall a short bit that might make the slightest bit of sense to a human. “Ok, here’s one.”

 _Behold, the radiation of the star above_  
_Inverse black hole speaks to my spark_  
 _Scorches the ions of my armor_  
 _Dust bleeds into nothingness_  
 _And I cannot shift forms_

He tilted his head as if re-listening to it again in the silence that followed, then frowned. “I swear that sounds a lot better in the original Cybertronian. I don’t think I got the translation quite right.”

Verity crossed her arms. “Yeah, that sucked. Give me the original, if only to scrub that crap from my brain.”

Springer shrugged. “Ok, but even beyond the language thing, some of the frequencies are outside the range of what you can even hear.”

She threw her hands up in the air. “I don’t care! Anything to scour the image of Megatron whining like a high school sophomore from my brain is welcome at this point.”

“Ok, ok… here goes…” He took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out, shuttering his optics and lifting his hands out to the side, palms up. Verity felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end, feeling rather than hearing the deep bass frequencies that seemed to come from Springer’s entire frame and buzz through her chest. A series of mid-range chirps and bleeps emanated from his mouth in rhythmic blurbs, and her ears rang with a high-pitched hum that she could just barely grasp. It only lasted a few moments, but it left her heart thumping and palms sweating, nonetheless. When he finished, he opened his optics, lowered his hands, and shrugged again. “The Tarnish accent puts a hard flange on the verbs that I can’t quite get. Impactor does it better than I can. I think you get the idea, though.”

“Yeah,” Verity agreed, breathless. “That was way cooler.”

* * *

_Verity-_

_Your effort to blackmail me – again – fails._

_You operate on the false premise that Kup and Springer have complete autonomy over their neural functions when, in fact, they do not. Subsection 156 of Section 25, Article 4 of the_ Autobot Code _gives members of Autobot High Command access to function control of Special Forces soldiers, of which Kup and Springer were both members at the times of my actions upon them._

_I presume you understand that you cannot “out” my actions upon Kup without also outing his slaughter of 50 fellow Autobots and outing Springer’s role in him doing so. As for my actions upon Springer… what you may not understand is that I care far less about my popularity than I care for the survival of the Autobots in general. Springer’s removal from operation after the Garrus-9 mission was necessary to Autobot survival in more ways than I have time to detail to you or that you are entitled to know. Any attack you make upon my character using my actions upon Springer will be met with the full litany for why my actions were necessary. I assure you Springer will come out looking far worse than I._

_Your effort to stand up for your friends, while admirable, is short-sighted. Your knowledge of Autobot history, law, and morality remain limited. I recommend you acquaint yourself more thoroughly with each from primary sources, particularly the_ Autobot Code _, which you can access with the Array. I also recommend that you do not rely on Springer’s interpretation of it; more than a few subsections of it were written as a result of his actions._

_Remember that you are harboring an alien. Inasmuch as he is able to adapt to alien worlds, languages, and cultures (and even I will admit that Springer is more adaptable than most), he does not operate on the same principles that you do. He may surprise you in ways you find unpleasant. I recommend you prepare yourself for that, as well._

_-Prowl_

* * *

She stepped out into the warm darkness, late-June not yet far enough in the season for the still evening air to carry much in the way of oppressive humidity. The last tendrils of twilight faded in the west, the daylight hours almost fully stretched to their solstice limits. The yard would have been almost fully shrouded in the dark, save for the brilliant, if intermittent, iridescence.

Fireflies. Thousands of fireflies, concentrated in the hedges along the wooden fence, flickering in response to Springer’s navigational strobe lights.

Springer lay on his back in the grass, arms splayed out, wrists turned up to point the strobes up to the sky, flashing a short pattern of light bursts. The fireflies responded with the same pattern. On they went, back and forth, and Verity couldn’t tell who was mimicking whom.

She set the cooler on the ground, pulled out a beer, then sat on the cooler lid as she cracked the can open. The noise appeared not to disturb the display, so she took a few swallows, then closed her eyes, continuing to enjoy the lightshow as it penetrated her eyelids and the beer bubbled its way down her throat. She remained still for several moments, letting the sound of the crickets and peeper frogs penetrate her mind alongside the flickering lights, absorbing the very essence of summer.

Finally, the beer lurched in her stomach. Unable to resist, she opened her mouth wide and released an enormous belch.

When it finally ended five seconds later, she was aware of a small gap of silence before the crickets picked up again.

“You’re destroying the mood.” Springer’s voice was low, his words just a bit slurred, carrying more rasp than usual.

“Sorry. But don’t pretend like you’re not already blitzed.”

A deep sigh. “Maybe.”

She snorted a laugh and took another few swallows of her beer. It had been a long day of crop dusting for both of them. Verity had flown with Springer to pick up the rental tanks and sprayer booms at an agricultural aviation hangar thirty miles away, rigged them to Springer’s frame, flown with him to fill the tanks at the ag supply store fifteen miles away from that, came back to the farm for the actual dusting, back to the hangar to return the equipment, to the carwash to deal with the spray residue, then finally back to the farm. He deserved to unwind more than she did, considering the sheer miles of heavy lifting. Luckily, he’d stumbled upon a way to distill engex cells directly from the wind turbines last week, and the results were proving favorable tonight.

They had been worried about impacting the surrounding insect life with the dusting, but one benefit of using a helicopter for the task was the downdraft that pushed everything almost directly onto and under the crop cover with relatively little escaping off to the side. Tonight’s firefly return appeared to confirm that everything off-field was fine.

“You’re not gonna, like, interfere with any air traffic with those lights pointed straight up, are you?”

“When was the last time you saw anything other than me fly within a 40 mile radius of this place?”

She tipped her beer in his direction in a one-sided toast. “Point taken. Still… don’t you worry about getting picked up by a Google satellite or something?”

Another sigh. “That went by an hour ago. We’re fine.”

“Ssssooo… you’re telling me you know where all of Earth’s imaging satellites are?”

“All of the ones that work at the moment, yes. It should come as no surprise that very few of them are ever pointed here.”

“Huh.” The more she thought about it, the more she realized that, _of course_ he had that base covered. He had _all_ the bases covered. He always did. It’s how he was. It’s _what_ he was.

She finished her beer, sitting quietly on the cooler lid, chin propped in her hands, elbows planted on her knees. She didn’t remember her eyes once again sliding closed and didn’t know how much time had passed before she nodded off and almost fell off the cooler. Paying heed to the aches of her body, she got up, grabbed the handle of the cooler with one hand, tipped off a brief salute in Springer’s direction with the other, and headed inside to bed.

* * *

The next afternoon found them once again in the doorway of the barn, relaxing in the sunlight. Springer dozed while he charged directly from the solar panels, still low on reserves after yesterday’s work. One knee was pulled up, and Verity lay back on the incline of his thigh, reading. Despite Springer’s stillness, a plethora of noises emanated from various locations in his frame from time to time; the whir of a fan, the tick of metal as it heated or cooled, the hum of a pump. She checked his function monitor on her handset to confirm it was all part of his routine maintenance processes; software updates, nanite self-repair, fuel transfers through tank baffles. The racket finally died down after an hour or so, but his optics remained shuttered as he slept. She did not interrupt, knowing that he sometimes had trouble sleeping at night. He had not been forthcoming about the reasons. Nonetheless, sleep seemed to come easily for him in the daylight, so she let him catch up on it when he could.

After another half hour or so, she dozed off herself.

She woke later, time measured only by the different angle of the sun, too lazy to look at her watch. Springer’s optics were obscured by his book, held a foot or so in front of his face so he could make out the print, but he once again indicated his awareness of her conscious state with a brief flicker of his parking lights.

She settled back to watch him for a few moments, pondering the oddity of the fact that, when hanging out with giant alien robots, the safest place to be was either sitting on top of them or inside of them as a passenger. The most dangerous places were just within an arm or foot’s reach, where one could get squished by accident. Riding atop a shoulder had its precarious moments but was generally clear of the sharp and shooty bits. Resting on a hip or thigh was fine for sitting around, at least with Springer’s configuration; he could always tell where she was and balance himself accordingly. But nothing beat the security of the cabin of his alt modes. Surrounded by armor and bullet-proof canopy. Flanked by heavy-combat machine guns. Driven by an ancient alien mind, seasoned by millennia of war. Yet he appeared to think nothing of the intimacy of literally allowing her inside of him, a gender reversal that had nagged at the back of her mind but which had likely not even occurred to him. At worst, Cybertronians were mildly squeamish about having “squishys” as passengers, and Springer had explicitly stated his “no vomiting in here” policy at the outset. The primary concern was not invasion per se, but aversion to any residue that might get left behind.

Which, when you thought about it, was sort of hilarious.

Almost as hilarious as watching him hold a tiny book in his hands while his fingers fumbled to turn the pages.

Her thoughts drifted back to the intimacy issue. Springer was easy enough to live with, absent of any obvious annoying habits, had lived in confined quarters with unruly comrades aboard Debris for who knew how long, and had lost more than his fair share of them over the course of the war. Surviving that required a certain amount of emotional distance. A certain detachment. Had he always been like that? Had he ever let anyone in? Would he ever be capable of it in the future?

She watched as he turned another page, and she could stand it no longer.

“Ssooo… I’m curious.”

“Hm?” Springer lowered the book. She noticed the malleable skin around his optic shields twitch as the lenses behind them changed focus. “About what?”

“The whole Conjunx Endura thing. How does that work?”

He tilted his head, once again running through the translations, once again not quite coming up with precise matches. “Sort of like marriage, I guess. Just without the sex and the kids. And the possibility that it could last for millions of years if you’re lucky.”

“So what happens in place of the sex and kids? Is it, like, a romantic thing? Is it more than just a really good friendship?”

Springer took a deep breath before wading into unfamiliar territory. “Offspring generally aren’t a thing for us, unless you’re the son of a mad scientist.”

“Har har.”

“We don’t have what you’d call _sex_ , either, but we have a few rituals that require a fair amount of emotional intimacy and comfort with physical proximity. _Telepathy_ isn’t quite the right word, but close enough. Letting someone in your head. Off-lining your weapons. Leaving yourself vulnerable. Trusting your partner not to go deeper into your head than you want them to. Trusting them not to broadcast what they find there. Trusting them not to overpower you or hurt you. First time with a new person is always exciting and scary. You don’t know how things will balance out or what the other person really wants. Usually it works out and it’s fun, but sometimes it’s a disaster. People who are lucky enough to find someone they’re on the same wavelength with, get through it enough times to finally get comfortable with them, those usually go Conjunx.”

Verity nodded, thinking that for all the differences, there were a hell of a lot of similarities. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

He paused, wondering what kind of trap he was about to walk into. “You can _ask_.” His tone made it plain that he might not _answer_.

“Have you ever had one? A Conjunx?”

“… No.”

Verity leaned forward and wrapped her arms around her shins. “Is this a sore subject?”

“Not really. Conjunx Endurae aren’t as common for us as marriage is for you. It’s unheard of for Wreckers.”

“Against club policy?”

“Not officially, but no one wants to take their chances with us. Even with each other. People who lose a Conjunx…” He shook his head. “They don’t do well. A lot of them don’t recover all the way.”

“Have you ever wanted to? Anyone ever catch your eye over the last few million years?”

“I had a few possibilities before I joined the Wreckers. They all fizzled out. I had the emotional depth of a birdbath back then, so…” He shrugged and dropped his gaze. “I think First Aid might’ve had a thing for me a while back. I always got this nice little buzz in my head when I crossed paths with him, and he is sort of adorable…” A frown crossed his features and he brought his gaze back up to meet Verity’s. “Wanna’ know what I did with that?”

“Sure.”

“I used it. I recruited him as a courier. I had a mole in the DJD who shot Autobots with non-detonating shells holding messages. He’d shoot them right here,” he pointed at the eye of the Autobot insignia on his chest, “so First Aid would know where to look for the shells. He’d dig them out and send them to me.”

Verity nodded. “Was he in any extra danger?”

“Not really.”

“Did you lead him on?”

“I don’t think so. I tried not to.”

“So you weren’t a total asshole to him, then. You used him, but you weren’t a dick about it.”

Another shrug. “I wasn’t a dick. I guess I’ll take it.”

“So what about now? Any future possibilities? Or were you planning on living in this barn for the rest of your life?”

“Huh.” He leaned his head back against the door frame, gaze wandering out to the yard. “Hadn’t really thought about it.” He cast his thoughts about, considering his possibilities. “Most everyone I know well is either dead or hates me. Who’s left? Magnus isn’t really my type…”

“Oh god, don’t even go there…”

“Impactor shot me in the back…”

“Awkward…”

“Whirl tried to euthanize me…”

“Double awkward…”

“Perceptor thinks I’m an idiot…”

“Fair enough…”

“Jazz pointed my own gun at my head once…”

“What _is_ it with you?”

“Well… shit…”

“What?” Verity straightened.

Springer smiled. “You’re gonna’ hate this.”

“Try me.”

His smile faded as he once more dropped his gaze. “Arcee.” His voice was quiet.

“ _What?_ ”

“I said you’d hate it.”

“But she was ready to annihilate me and Kup when Prowl disappeared!”

 “She eased up when she realized you weren’t the right targets.”

“She called you a condescending stick-shift!”

“She wasn’t entirely wrong about that.”

“Uuuuhhhgghgh…” Verity leaned back and pulled her hair down over her face. “I don’t understand what you see in her.”

“Primarily? Her ability to see right through _me_.”

Verity pointed a finger at him. “I did not expect to ever hear this kind of schlock come out of you.”

Springer lifted his hands, palms up, as if in apology. “I’m a little shocked at it myself. I didn’t even realize what happened until a day or so after the whole Noisemaze thing. But right before we boarded Tidal Wave, she said a couple things that hit way too close to the mark for someone who’d only met me an hour earlier.”

Verity shook her head. “I was there, but I must have missed it. Lots of blaster fire at that moment.”

“That’s exactly it,” Springer said. “What she said boiled down to the fact that I didn’t seem fully alive until the situation got bad. Like, really bad. And she was right. From the moment I woke up until the time the fight really came on, part of me still felt… dead.”

“And now that you’re done fighting?”

Springer’s gaze slid back out to the sunlit yard, but a small smile still pulled at the corner of his mouth. Verity couldn’t tell if it was happiness or irony. “Not dead. But not the kind of life you feel when you’re a razor’s breadth from being dead.”

“Just the kind of life you feel when you get stoned and blink at fireflies all night.”

“Fair enough.” He laughed and brought his optics back to meet her gaze. “And that’s the other side of the coin with her. I’m done fighting. I don’t think she ever will be. So no future there, either. But who knows…” He titled his head back against the door frame, optics polarized against the sun as he gazed up at it. “I’ve managed to live a few million years under heavy fire and I’m not at the end of my rope yet. I’ve got time to cross paths with someone. What about you? Your clock’s ticking a lot faster than mine.”

“Oh, man…” She should’ve seen that coming. “I’m not sure that particular clock ever _started_. No prospects for me.”

She had turned to look out to the yard as well, but could feel his optics on her, could see the lift of an optic ridge out of the corner of her eye. He remained silent, but she could guess the words he kept locked back. _Yeah, I sort of just opened up to you there, and now you’re going to let me hang on my own even though I know you have **loads** to say about it. _ A slow ”Okay…” was all he voiced, but his tone conveyed the rest.

“I’ll be ready for that conversation about the same time you’re ready to fess up about why you can’t sleep at night.”

“Okay.” Dialed way back, this time.

“Sorry. That came out sharper than I meant it to.”

“It’s alright. Good to know where the boundaries are.”

Verity lowered her gaze. Boundaries. Here she was, sitting on a giant alien robot arguing about boundaries. God, she had to stop it with the _robot_ thing. His alienness, his sheer difference from anyone else she had ever known, had always been nothing but a comfort for her. Prowl was dead wrong about that. She knew, down to the core of her being, that Springer would protect her with his life. But she couldn’t even let him in all the way. If not him, who? If not now, when?

Springer noted her downcast eyes and turned his own gaze back out to the yard. The kid still had some deep wounds. So did he. They’d been living here for just over a year and they still had to tread carefully around each other. Not that he was surprised; it would just take time and careful handling. He had all the time in the world. Verity, though… The lines etched under his optics were nothing compared to the aging she had undergone over the last ten years. She looked nothing like the kid who first showed up in Autobot records not so long ago. Would she heal in time? Would she regain wholeness before she grew too old to enjoy it? Was there anything he could do to help her along that path?

Or was he just getting in the way? Enabling an isolation from her own kind that would only serve to further deepen her wounds? He had noticed her stiffness when she interacted with other humans. Had noticed her greater ease with him than with anyone of her own species. It wasn’t right, and he found himself battling back the sudden wave of sadness he felt for her.

 _It’s only temporary_ , he reminded himself. He reminded himself, once again, of her propensity of running aw- moving on. Her ability to shift gears when it suited her. Sure, this was an escape. One they both needed. She’d leave when she was ready. Until then, he would do what he’d always done for her.

Protect her.

A ping rang in his audio and he noted the blinking icon in the lower-right of his field of vision – he was fully charged. He pulled the lead from the solar panel out of his arm and looked once more at the sun, noting the time. Even though he’d slept through most of the afternoon, he knew Verity hadn’t left her perch from his thigh for long enough to eat anything since breakfast this morning. “How ‘bout you get yourself some dinner? I’ll get a fire started outside. I can regale you with more labor protest poetry while you eat.”

“Uuuhhhh…” She sat up and climbed down to the floor, heading for the stairway leading up to her living space and kitchen. “Maybe stick with the original Cybertronian.”


	4. I Have Better Things to Dream of Tonight than Electric Sheep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Springer's zero-point flashback/nightmare leads to Yet Another Existential Crisis.

_Leanin' over you here_  
_Cold and catatonic_  
_I catch a brief reflection_  
_Of what you could and might have been_  
_It's your right and your ability_  
_To become my perfect enemy_  
_Wake up and face me_

A Perfect Circle, [Passive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMe4kVNKvNk)

* * *

 

“Pathetic.”

Guzzle’s voice.

“You don’t deserve this. Dying peacefully. Roadbuster reading you bedtime stories of all the battles you fought together. All the Decepticons you killed together. You guys go out and slaughter people and get called heroes. I go out and slaughter people and Impactor throws me in a box.”

_He doesn’t know I can hear him. No one knows I can hear them._

Springer has no idea how long he’s been trapped inside his own head. All he knows is that he phases between the past and present; a patina of flashbacks scattered throughout a background of silence and darkness, shot through with disembodied voices. Re-living the past for a moment, recalling every sound, smell, vision, and touch; the next moment suspended in total numbness, paralyzed; the next moment gaining awareness of a voice, usually Roadbuster’s, reading embellished tales of the past. The stories are no longer new; he’s heard them all before. Springer can’t tell if Roadbuster is repeating himself or if he’s remembering things out-of-order.

But now it’s Guzzle’s voice he’s hearing. He doesn’t remember hearing these words before, but he knows exactly what they’re referring to. He knows exactly what Guzzle’s beef with him is, and he can’t entirely disagree with it.

“I know all about Tsiehshi. I had friends there. Most of them are dead now because of what you did. You swore the rest to secrecy, but you know what? Something that big can’t stay quiet. It won’t blow up because it’s you and Kup. You guys are Teflon. Nothing sticks to you. Anyone else did that… order dozens of ‘bots to their deaths when it wasn’t necessary… they’d be in G-9 for the rest of their lives. But you? You’re on a table playing dead. You’ll be interred with full honors once you finally bite it.

“I want nothing more than to put a bullet in your head right now. But that’s too easy for both of us. You’re too easy to kill. You also might be in a lot of pain right now, and I wouldn’t want to end that. And if you ever do wake up? I will kill you. Maybe not right away. I think you’d be pretty messed up after this, and that might be fun to watch. But once you’re back to full strength, once you’re ready to struggle, I’m going to end you.”

Springer can’t see it, but he can hear Guzzle bend lower, the whirr of servos as he brings his mouth close to whisper into Springer’s audio.

“Because _that’s_ what you deserve.”

Springer finally breaks through, finally gains control, finally feels his own body around him, in the dark in his ground mode, and yields to the instinct to transform to his robot mode.

He had one-tenth of a second to realize his mistake before the back of his head connected with the solid oak beam that ran the width of the barn, sending him back to the floor, face-first and sprawling.

Verity woke to the crack of steel-on-wood and the thump of the floor beneath her, followed by the unceremonious clang of steel-on-concrete. She was out of bed before she was entirely conscious, slapping at the switch for the overhead lights just outside of her room. Looking out over the rail, she saw Springer down on one knee, one hand behind his head, the other planted on the floor, keeping the rest of him upright, face pointed to the floor.

“Are you ok?”

“No… Yes! Yeah, I’m… fine…”

“Rrrriiiight…”

They both paused for a moment, the sound of Springer’s ventilation fans cycling down only to be joined by the sound of a slow, steady drip.

Blood energon falling from Springer’s face.

“Goddammit…” Springer whispered the words under his breath. He pulled his hand from behind his head, and Verity saw that his palm was covered in blood, too. “Goddammit…”

Verity had seen enough to know that this rate of energon loss was something his self-repair could take care of on its own, but also knew that the highly-volatile substance shouldn’t be allowed to pool. She headed down the stairs and grabbed a few rag-towels from the workbench, handing two of them to Springer and using the third to mop up the floor. “So what brought all this on?”

Springer shifted to a sitting position, applying pressure to the back of his head with one hand and his nose with the other, optics shuttered against the pain. Knowing he owed Verity an explanation for waking her up, he took a breath to collect his thoughts on a way to get out of this as quickly as possible. “Flashback from the zero-point. Guzzle threatening to kill me over what happened at Tsiehshi when he thought I couldn’t hear him.”

She paused her work and looked up, unable to read his expression behind his hand. “Wow. Did that really happen?”

“I think so, yeah. Just didn’t remember it until now.”

“That’s… creepy.”

“Yeah. Imagine listening to that while you’re blind and paralyzed.”

Verity let out a low, long whistle. “So you woke up, reflex-transformed, bashed your head on the beam, then bashed your face on the floor.”

“… Yes.”

“Sounds reasonable enough. Anything busted up there?”

“Broke my nose again. I can re-set it myself but you should go outside before I do. It’s gonna sound terrible. Cracked a seal on the back of my head, but it’s coagulating fine. That’s it.”

“Any protocol or something you can put in place so this doesn’t happen again? I’d rather you didn’t bring the barn down on top of both of us from re-living your personal Nightmare on Elm Street.”

“Yeah, I can dial down my transformation speed. No reason to keep it battle-tuned for now.”

“Can’t you block the nightmare app itself? Stop it at the source?”

“Nope, I’m stuck with that. Nothing I can do without a mnemosurgeon, anyway.”

“A what?”

“Mnemosurgeon. Um…” Springer paused, coming up blank on a direct translation. “Like a brain surgeon, but they rewrite memories instead of fixing structural issues.”

“That sounds like a recipe for disaster. You need to see _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ sometime.”

“Oh, yeah, Whirl had us watch that ages ago. Anyway, yeah, it can be therapeutic for some heavy-trauma cases, but it was mainly used for government coercion in the bad old days. Whirl was furious that the movie didn’t take any kind of political angle with it.”

“Have you ever had it done?”

“No, not that I kn-”

Springer stopped mid-sentence, optics staring at the floor.

“Shit.”

“What?”

“Get your handset, go upstairs, and turn off the lights. I need you to look at the back of my neck with the UV setting on the handset.”

“Ok…” Verity dashed upstairs while Springer got up, moved so his back was to the second-level railing,  and sat back down so she could get a good look.

The darkness that shrouded them when the lights went out was replaced by the dim glow of the UV emitting from the handset. “Tell me what you see,” Springer said.

“Well… still some blood streaking back here. What am I looking for?”

“Needle marks. Four or five of them in a semi-circle. The needles come out of the fingertips, so…”

“Nope. Not seeing anything like that.”

Springer heaved a long sigh. “Yeah, going in through the neck is too sloppy for Prowl. They could’ve gone directly through my brain module.”

“Dude. I am _not_ opening up your head.”

“Agreed.” Springer stood up and turned to face Verity. “But I’ve done the math. Prowl dated a mnemosurgeon before I came on-line.”

“Ok, I can only handle so much craziness at one time, so I’m gonna ignore the fact that Prowl _ever_ dated _anyone_ for the moment. But it would explain why you don’t remember your Ostaros days.”

Springer shrugged. “Block wipeouts can happen in a lot of ways. I’m more worried about what’s in there that isn’t real.”

“You said before that your earliest memory was getting Autobranded. Does that one seem different from your other early stuff?”

“It’s oddly sharp, given that I can’t remember much of anything else from that time. I don’t even remember meeting Kup, which must have happened around the same time. And Autobranding is exactly the kind of thing Prowl would implant. Patriotic indoctrination is right up his alley.” Springer put a hand to the side of his head. “That settles it.”

“Prowl’s been in your head.”

“Prowl’s ex-partner’s been in my head. On Prowl’s orders. Most likely. Having someone else re-write my past to suit his needs fits his MO, anyway.”

“Bleah.” Verity’s face scrunched in disgust. She turned to head outside so that Springer could re-set his nose in peace but stopped several paces short of the door. “How were things going between Prowl and his partner when all this happened?”

Springer shook his head. “No idea. They broke up a few vorns before and I don’t imagine they parted on good terms. Why?”

“Does mnemosurgery only deal with memories or does it include personality too?”

Springer’s expression darkened, recalling the more horrific results of shadowplay. “It’s been used to entirely re-write personalities. Why?”

“So, Prowl’s ex, who may or may not have been on excellent terms with him at the time, messes with your memories on Prowl’s orders. You have the exact kind of personality that gets under Prowl’s skin the most. I’m just thinking that’s a hell of a coincidence.”

Springer paused for several moments, considering. Considering the likelihood that he was the way he was because of a spat between Prowl and his ex. The sarcasm. The confidence. The charisma. The ability to improvise. All of it overlaying the cornerstone desire to do the right thing, serving the unrelenting drive to do absolutely whatever was necessary to make the world safe. Prowl’s match at that core drive, while at the same time Prowl’s complete opposite at the implementation of that drive.

How much of it was really him? What he’d started with? How much of him was written in the spiteful reverse-image of a mech who had been well on his way to becoming a monster?

As if it wasn’t enough that he was built and programmed by a different monster in the first place…

Verity watched all of it pass over Springer’s face, regretting having made the observation out loud, wondering how to rectify it. “Dude, if you _were_ programmed to piss off Prowl? Mission accomplished. No one else could have done as thorough of a job as you did.”

“Yeah, well… happy to serve. Get out so I can re-set this thing.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Verity turned, shoved the barn door open just enough to slide out, then shoved it closed again as she stepped into the Nebraska night.

None of it was enough to shield her ears from the crunch of Springer re-setting his nose from the other side.

* * *

_Chromedome,_

_Prowl and I had a run-in with Mesothulas recently. I know I was Ostaros. I think you knew, too._

_One question. You know what I’m asking. I think I know the answer already, but I’d like some closure._

_So. Yes or no?_

_-Springer_

* * *

_Springer,_

_Yes._

_-CD_

* * *

Springer read the message, dropped his gaze from the array, and nodded to himself.

This was not a surprise.

_This was not a surprise._

But shock and surprise were different things, and one could feel the first in the absence of the other.

The sound of Verity’s slippered feet scuffing along the floor behind his head broke his chain of thought. “Wazzaaaap?”

“I sent a message to the mnemosurgeon a few days ago. Just heard back.” Springer turned to face her. She was wrapped in a bathrobe, fresh out of the shower, her hair still wet. She was just about ready to go to bed. “We were right. I was written by Prowl’s ex.”

Verity leaned forward, propping her elbows on the railing. “So what?”

“So…” He found himself at a lack for anything to lean back on, so he settled for diverting his gaze to the side. After a few moments of thought, he found himself at a lack of a response, so he settled for shrugging a shoulder.

“So your codec was written by a mnemosurgeon. You think that somehow makes you less real? Like you’re manufactured?” Verity’s gaze was directed at Springer’s optics, despite his refusal to meet it. “My DNA was written by a random shuffle of two different decks. Organisms without so much as a brain do the same thing. Doesn’t make me less real. What makes us real is what we do with what we have. You were built by a monster. Half of my DNA came from a monster. You were written with questionable purpose. I was raised under questionable circumstances. But… here we are. You’re a decorated war hero and I’m… a… well-traveled human. We’ve made our own decisions, played our own strengths, and compensated for our own weaknesses to make it this far. How is that not real?”

Springer bit back on his usual “It doesn’t work the same way for us” response. She didn’t understand that the very randomness of her creation was _exactly_ what made her more real. She didn’t understand that for those who are deliberately written, the creation can be no more than a product of the author. A reflection of the creator.

And _everything_ he had ever done was a reflection of the method of his creation.

Tsiehshi. Pova. Aequitas. G9. All he had ever been was a tool of war. For all his desire to bring an end to evil, he had never quite managed it.

If anything, he’d only managed to push it further along.

Except for the Wrookies.

He forced himself to take a mental step back, reminding himself of his new recruits. _They will be better_ , he reminded himself. _They will learn from my mistakes and they will be better._

Nothing about bringing them together had been written into him. Nothing about them came from Mesothulas or Prowl or Chromedome.

They were all about Kup. What he had learned from Kup and what he would pass on to them was what made him more than a product of his creators. What made him real.

He brought his optics up to Verity, still standing at the rail, still waiting for a response. Rather than explain his most recent train of thoughts, he allowed half of a smile to cross his face. “If compensating for my weaknesses makes me real, then fair enough. I’ve got about four million years of realness on the books.”

Verity returned the half-smile, knowing there was more to it than what he had just said, but understanding that he didn’t want to get into the details. “Fair enough,” she replied, and then she turned to head to her room for the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, the title is a mashup of Springer's iconic "I have better things to do tonight than die" movie line and the title of Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" which, of course, was the basis for "Bladerunner." The sequel, "Bladerunner 2049" knocked me off of my feet in terms of AI existentialism and inspired much of this story.


End file.
